Family Record

by Patrick Modiano

  D’AUXION DE RUFFÉ, 20 Zeng wou Tseng, 01-41-28

  ÉTABLISSEMENTS SASSOON, Soochow Creek, 78-20-11

  SINCÈRE DEPARTMENT STORES, Nanking Road, 40-33-17

  A spindly ring. We didn’t answer until we were sure it was the telephone. Marignan picked up the receiver, and I the extension. The exchanges were always the same:

  “Hello? George Wo?” Marignan said in a flat voice.

  “How are you, Henri?”

  “Fine. And you?”

  A few seconds of silence.

  “So what’s new, Wo?” Marignan asked in a falsely jovial tone.

  “I’m making contacts.”

  “And?”

  “It’s coming along, my dear Toto. Just a little more patience.”

  “For how long, George?”

  “I’ll call you. So long, Henri.”

  “So long, Wo.”

  He hung up. And each time, we were sorely disappointed.

  From the large living room came the buzz of conversation. They had company, as usual. Geneviève Catelain waved us over. We walked toward her through small clusters of guests, but didn’t speak to anyone. She saw us to the door.

  “See you later, Henri,” she said to Marignan. “Don’t be home too late.”

  She stood in the doorway, blonde and charged with a mysterious electricity that moved me.

  The night began. Often we would meet up with George Wo-heu and the three of us would have dinner at the Calavados, a throwback restaurant on Avenue Pierre-1er-de-Serbie, staying out until two in the morning. The ordeal left us feeling edgy. There was no use asking him directly about what contacts he might or might not have made at the embassy on our behalf. He avoided answering by changing the subject, or by uttering generalities such as, “Embassies are like rabbits. You have to approach them slowly so as not to scare them off, right, Toto?” His smile split his face in two. Marignan never attacked frontally, instead proceeding by sly allusions and subtle asides. George Wo-heu dodged them all. Worn out, Marignan would end up asking, “Do you really think we’ll get to meet someone at the embassy?” To which George Wo-heu invariably replied, “You know perfectly well that China is a long patience, my dear Toto, and you have to deserve her.” He drew on his cigarette, immediately exhaled, and his face disappeared behind a screen of smoke.

  Before taking his leave, he would say:

  “I’ll call you tomorrow. I might have news. So long.”

  Then Marignan and I, to build up our hope and morale, would have a last drink in the empty room of the Calavados. What would Roger Fu-seng’s reaction be when he learned that his old friend Henri, from the Journal de Shanghai, was trying to find him? He couldn’t have forgotten. Not possible.

  Diplomatic relations would soon be established between France and China, across the miles and the years. But Wo-heu was surely right and it was important not to rush things. We might snap the gossamer thread.

  On Avenue de New York, at the door to his building, Marignan shook hands good-bye.

  “Not a word about this China business to Geneviève, okay, old man? I’m counting on you. See you tomorrow. Don’t worry—the end is in sight.”

  I returned to my tiny room on Square de Graisivaudan. I leaned on the windowsill. Why did Marignan want to go to China? In hopes of recapturing his youth, I told myself. And what about me? It was the other side of the world. I convinced myself that it was where I would find my roots, my home, my native soil, everything I didn’t have.

  The telephone rang and, despite our intercessor’s promises, there was never any news. We now spent our days waiting in a café on Avenue de New York, next door to the apartment. George Wo-heu would come join us.

  Marignan knocked back strong, sugary drinks, and I let myself follow suit. At sixty, he seemed to hold his liquor much better than I could. He was from the provinces, and his physique still retained that peasant robustness and solidity. Except his eyes, of course, which betrayed an inner collapse.

  He spoke to me of the lotus fields in Suchow. Very early in the morning, we would cross the lake in a boat and see the lotus flowers open with the sunrise.

  The days went by. We hardly ever left the café. We let ourselves be overcome by a kind of despondency. We still experienced moments of hope and elation, the certainty that we would be leaving soon. But the seasons changed. Soon there was nothing around us but a tender fog, pierced by the ever hazier contour of George Wo.

  III

  Rue Léon-Vaudoyer and a few other small streets that all looked the same formed a vague enclave between two parts of the 7th arrondissement. On the right began the aristocratic part of the seventh; to the left was Grenelle, the Ecole Militaire, and, back when, the din of rowdy soldiers in the brasseries of La Motte-Picquet.

  My grandmother lived on that Rue Léon-Vaudoyer. When? In the thirties, I believe. At what address? I don’t know, but the buildings on Rue Léon-Vaudoyer were all built on the same model around 1900, such that the same entryways, the same windows, the same corbeling form a monotonous façade stretching from one end of the street to the other on both sides. In the gap between them, you can see the Eiffel Tower. On the first house on the right, a plaque states: “Property of Les Rentiers de l’Avenir.” Perhaps she lived there. I know almost nothing about her. I don’t know what she looked like, as every photograph of her—assuming there were any—has vanished. She was the daughter of an upholsterer from Philadelphia. My grandfather, for his part, had spent part of his youth in Alexandria, before leaving for Venezuela. By what twists of fate had they met in Paris, and had she ended up spending her final years on Rue Léon-Vaudoyer?

  I followed the path she must have taken to return home. It was a sunny October afternoon. I walked up all the neighboring streets: Rue César-Franck, Rue Albert-de-Lapparent, Rue José-Marie-de-Heredia . . . In what shops had she been a regular customer? There’s a grocery store on Rue César-Franck. Was it already there at the time? On Rue Valentin-Haüy, an old restaurant still bears the inscription in a semicircular arch: “Wines and spirits.” Did her two sons take her there one evening?

  I entered Rue Léon-Vaudoyer, first from Avenue de Saxe, then via Rue Pérignon, stopping in front of each building entrance. In each stairwell were identical elevators, and among them was the one she used to take. She knew peaceful late afternoons like this one, when she came home under the same sun and along the same sidewalk. And one could forget about the looming war.

  At the corner of Avenue de Saxe, I glanced back one final time at Rue Léon-Vaudoyer. A charmless, treeless street, just like dozens of others on the fringes of Paris’s bourgeois neighborhoods. Nearby, on Avenue de Saxe, I went into an old bookstore. Did she sometimes go there to buy a novel? No, the bookseller told me she’d been in that location for only fifteen years, and before that the space was a hat shop. Stores change ownership: that’s business. You end up not really knowing the exact space that things occupied. Thus, in 1917, when Big Bertha threatened Paris, my grandmother had brought her children to a place near Enghien, to a relative of hers, a certain James Levy. They came for him one day and no one ever saw him again. My grandmother wrote to the police and the Army Ministry. To no avail. She finally decided they had shot James Levy by mistake, as a German spy.

  I, too, wanted to know more, but I’ve yet to find the slightest trace, the slightest proof of James Levy’s existence on Earth. I even consulted archives in the Enghien town hall. And anyway, was it near Enghien?

  IV

  At age eighteen, my mother embarked on a film career in her native city of Antwerp. Before that, she had worked for the gas company and taken elocution lessons, but when they built a studio on Pyckestraat, the initiative of a certain Jan Vanderheyden, she showed up and was hired.

  A group quickly formed around Vanderheyden, who always employed the same cast and crew. He served as both producer and director and shot his movies in record time. The Pyckestraat studio was such a hive of activity that the papers called it “De Antwerpche Hollywood”: th
e Hollywood of Antwerp.

  My mother was the very young star of four Vanderheyden films. He shot the first two—This Man Is an Angel and Janssens versus Peeters—in the year 1939. The next two, Janssens and Peeters Reconciled and Good Luck, Monika, are from 1941. Three of these movies were light comedies set in Antwerp that make Vanderheyden (as one reviewer said) a kind of Belgian Marcel Pagnol; the fourth, Monika, was a musical.

  Meantime, Vanderheyden’s production company had been placed under German control and my mother was sent to Berlin for several weeks, where she had a minor role in Willi Forst’s Bel Ami.

  That year, 1939, she also signed with the Empire Theater in Antwerp. She worked as a “showgirl” and a “model.” From June through December, the Empire staged an adaptation of No, No, Nanette, and my mother was in it. Then, as of January 1940, she appeared in a “current events” variety show called Tomorrow Will Be Better. She was the centerpiece of the final tableau. While the chorus girls danced with “Chamberlain” umbrellas, my mother rose up in a basket, golden rays crowning her head. Higher and higher she rose, the rain stopped, the umbrellas came down. She was the image of the rising sun, its light dissipating all the shadows of the year 1940. From up in her basket, my mother waved to the audience and the orchestra played a medley. The curtain fell. And each time, for a laugh, the stagehands would leave her in the basket, alone up there in the dark.

  She lived on the second floor of a small house near Quai Van Dyck. One of her windows looked out on the Scheldt and the promenade along its banks, with the large café at the end. The Empire Theater and its dressing room, where every evening she applied her makeup. The Customs House. The waterfront area with its port and docks. I see her crossing the avenue as a streetcar rattles by, its yellow light swallowed by the fog. It’s nighttime. You can hear the horns of the steamers.

  The Empire’s wardrobe master was fond of my mother and offered to become her manager. A chubby-cheeked man with horn-rimmed glasses, who spoke very slowly. But at night, in a sailors’ bar in the Greek quarter, he performed a song-and-dance routine dressed as Madame Butterfly. According to him, Vanderheyden’s films, charming and frequent as they might be, were not enough to sustain an actress’s career. Have to aim higher, my dear. And in fact, he knew some big-time producers who were about to make a film but still needed a girl for the supporting role. He brought my mother to meet them.

  The producers were a certain Felix Openfeld and his father, whom everyone called Openfeld Senior. The latter, a gemstone dealer in Berlin, had fled to Antwerp when Hitler seized power in Germany and Jewish-owned businesses came under threat. The son had been production manager for the German film company Terra-Film, then worked in the United States.

  They liked my mother. They didn’t even give her a screen test, but instead had her act out a scene from the script right then and there. It was called Swimmers and Detectives, and had been custom-written for the Dutch Olympic swimming champion Wily den Ouden, who wanted to get her start in the movies. From what my mother said, the rather thin mystery plot was mainly an excuse for diving and synchronized swimming scenes. My mother played Wily den Ouden’s best friend.

  I found the contract she signed at the time. Two pages on heavy, watermarked, sky-blue paper, with the letterhead of Openfeld Films. The O of Openfeld is very large, with an elegant loop, upstrokes and downstrokes. Inside the O, a miniature Brandenburg Gate, finely rendered. I suppose it was there to remind people of the two producers’ Berlin origins.

  The contract stated that my future mother would receive an advance of seventy-five thousand Belgian francs, payable in installments at the start of each week of shooting. Both parties agreed that this salary could not be increased or reduced unless the contract was terminated or extended, as the case may be. It also stipulated that time spent in makeup and dressing would be considered preparation time and not billable hours.

  At the bottom of the page, my mother’s diligent signature. Felix Openfeld’s hasty signature. And a third, even more jagged, under which someone typed “Mr. Openfeld Senior.”

  The contract is dated April 21, 1940.

  They took my mother to dinner that evening. The wardrobe manager was among the party, as was the screenwriter, Henri Putmann, whose nationality was a mystery: Belgian? English? German? Wily den Ouden was supposed to join them to meet my mother but was detained at the last minute. A jolly evening. The two Openfelds—especially Felix—possessed that courtesy, at once stiff and lighthearted, typical of Berliners. Felix Openfeld was optimistic about the film. He already had interest from an American company. For all the years he’d been trying to persuade them to show “sports” detective comedies . . . During the dinner they took a photo, which I have here on my desk. The man with the dark, slicked-back hair, pencil mustache, and fine hands is Felix Openfeld. The two fat men slightly set back, Putmann and the wardrobe manager. The old man with the weasel head but magnificent oval eyes, Openfeld Senior. Finally, the young woman who looks like Vivien Leigh is my mother.

  At the start of the film, she had a solo scene. She straightened up her room while singing and answered the phone. Felix Openfeld, who was directing, had decided to shoot in script order.

  Shooting was set to begin on Friday, May 10, 1940, at Sonor Studios in Brussels. My mother was to show up at 10:30 a.m. Since she lived in Antwerp, she would take the very early train.

  The day before, she received an advance on her fee, with which she bought herself a handsome leather overnight bag and some Elizabeth Arden cosmetics. She returned home at the end of the afternoon, rehearsed her role a little more, had dinner, and went to bed.

  At around four in the morning, she was awoken by what she thought at first was a clap of thunder. But the noise continued—a dull, prolonged rumble. Ambulances sped by on Quai Van Dyck; people leaned out their windows. Sirens wailed all over the city. Her next-door neighbor told her in a tremulous voice that German planes were bombing the port. Then calm was restored and my mother went back to sleep. At seven o’clock, the alarm went off. In short order, she went down to wait for the streetcar on the little square, her overnight bag in hand. The streetcar never came. Groups of people walked by, murmuring to each other.

  She finally found a taxi, and during the entire trip to the train station, the driver repeated like a refrain, “We’re done for . . . done for . . . done for . . .”

  The station concourse was crowded and my mother had a hard time pushing her way through to the platform for the Brussels train. People were swarming around the conductor, peppering him with questions: no, the train was not running. He was awaiting instructions. And the same sentence on everyone’s lips: “The Germans have crossed the border . . . The Germans have crossed the border . . .”

  On the 6:30 news report, the radio announcer had said the Wehrmacht had invaded Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg.

  My mother felt someone touch her arm. She turned around. Openfeld Senior, wearing a black fedora. He was unshaven, his weasel head looked half-shrunken, and his eyes were inordinately huge. Two exorbitant blue eyes in a tiny head, like the kind a pygmy might collect. He dragged her out of the station.

  “We have to get to Felix in the studios . . . in Brussels . . . take a taxi . . . quickly . . . a taxi . . .”

  He half-swallowed his words.

  The drivers didn’t want to take on such a long journey for fear of bombardments. Openfeld Senior managed to convince one with a hundred-franc bill. In the taxi, Openfeld Senior said to my mother:

  “We’ll split the fare.”

  My mother told him she had only twenty francs on her.

  “No matter. We’ll sort it out at the studio.”

  During the trip, he didn’t say much. Now and then he consulted an address book and feverishly rifled through the pockets of his overcoat and jacket.

  “Is that all the luggage you’re taking with you?” he asked my mother, pointing to the leather overnight bag she was holding on her knees.

  “All what luggage?” />
  “Pardon me . . . Pardon me . . . It’s true, you’re staying here . . .”

  He murmured something inaudible. He turned to my mother.

  “I never thought they wouldn’t respect Belgian neutrality . . .”

  He stressed the syllables of “Bel-gian neu-tral-i-ty.” Until that day, those two words had clearly represented a vague hope, and he must have repeated them often, without really believing in them, but with so much good faith. Now they were swept aside with the rest. Belgian neutrality.

  The taxi reached Brussels and they followed Avenue de Tervueren, where several buildings had burned to the ground. Teams of firemen were combing through the rubble. The driver asked what happened. There had been a bombardment at around eight o’clock.

  In the courtyard of Sonor Studios were a van and a large convertible piled high with suitcases. When Openfeld Senior and my mother entered Soundstage B, Felix Openfeld was giving instructions to several technicians who were packing up the cameras and lights.

  “We’re leaving for America,” Felix Openfeld told my mother in a resolute voice.

  She sat on a stool. Openfeld Senior held out a cigarette case.

  “Wouldn’t you like to come with us? We can try to make the film over there.”

  “You shouldn’t have any trouble at the borders,” said Felix Openfeld. “You have a passport.”

  Their plan was to get to Lisbon as quickly as possible, via Spain. Felix Openfeld had obtained papers from the Portuguese consul—a good friend of his, he said.

  “The Germans will be in Paris tomorrow and London in two weeks,” Openfeld Senior declared, shaking his head.

  Three of them loaded the equipment into the van: the two Openfelds and Grunebaum, a former cameraman from Tobis Film, who, although Jewish, was the spitting image of Wilhelm II. My mother knew him because, the week before, he’d wanted to do a lighting test for the close-ups. Grunebaum settled behind the wheel of the van.